


That Is Not Dead Which Can Eternal Lie

by messageredacted



Category: Batman (Movies - Nolan), Cthulhu Mythos - H. P. Lovecraft, Dark Knight (2008)
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-01-14
Updated: 2012-01-14
Packaged: 2017-10-29 12:58:56
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 2
Words: 3,379
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/320143
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/messageredacted/pseuds/messageredacted
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Arkham is the city after which the asylum was named, and the latter has infected you so much you had to visit the former just to get some relief.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Originally written on 18 January 2010.

There's squid on the menu in the one restaurant in the city of Arkham that’s open on a Monday night. You wait out back by the dumpster for the busboy to come out with two bags of trash and you watch, hidden in the shadows, as one of the bags splits open like a belly and guts spill out, gray and rubbery. Not guts. Tentacles. The boy curses and starts to clean it up and you wonder why everything here is gray.

You have violence on your mind, like a song that’s stuck in your head. Earworms, they call them, and you think of it worming into your brain and you think of the tentacles and you hold your breath until the boy finishes cleaning up and disappears into the restaurant again. It’s not a busy night. Arkham-the-city is quiet tonight.

Arkham-the-asylum was never quiet at night. You get too many crazies together and it’s all noise all the time, each of them setting each other off like an echo chamber. You had to get out of there and so you did, although you keep thinking about the place. Arkham-the-asylum wasn’t the first asylum you’ve seen the inside of, but it’s the first that worked its way under your skin and keeps reminding you of its existence. Arkham is the city after which the asylum was named, and the latter has infected you so much you had to visit the former just to get some relief.

No one will think to look for you here. They’ll be combing Gotham, bracing for some big elaborate attack, getting out the big guns. They’ll be talking about you on the news. You’re going to do what they least expect: you’re going to leave without a backward glance. You’re going to disappear into the cracks, as you’ve done so many times before, and you’re going to wait until they all go away.

As soon as the alley is quiet, you start to move down it again. Arkham-the-city is a dismal place in the spring, gray and wet and dripping. You’ve got a coat that you swiped from an unlocked car and some nondescript clothes from a donation bin. You’re not wearing makeup, and that’s as incognito as you get. Anyone who gets a close look at your face will figure it out quick, but you’ve learned that people don’t look at each other in cities, and if you look like you’re homeless, you’ll be as good as invisible.

You pause at the corner of the alley and look down the sidewalk. The moon is hidden behind some clouds but it tugs at you, trying to get you to follow the sidewalk down to the harbor. You have practice at ignoring irrational urges, though, so you turn in the opposite direction and keep walking, keep moving, like a shark.

Cars slide down the street with their headlights on, making their way home from work. The shop fronts are shuttered for the evening and the few places that are still open seem empty. You keep to the buildings, walking with your head down. A whiff of fish smell from the water catches your nose. At the next street corner you can see down to the harbor, where a few cranes are silhouetted against the sky in the shipping yard. You might see something else flit across the sky, like a bird, but it’s so quick that maybe you didn’t see it at all.

Arkham-the-asylum makes you think of needles and medication and nurses in white uniforms, but so far Arkham-the-city makes you think of fish, and water, and a strange feeling that you’re being watched. You have had experience with being watched. You’re schizophrenic. There was a period in your life when you were young that you believed that everyone in the world was telepathic except you, and they were just pretending not to hear you thinking. Sometimes you would think bad thoughts as hard as you could and watch them to see if they would react. Sometimes they would flinch, although maybe they just didn’t like it when you watched them. It was hard to tell. People never like it when you watch them.

You keep walking and then you’re at the water somehow, although you’re pretty sure you started off in a different direction. The water is black under the sky and it sucks and slurps at the docks like a child eating ice cream. You look down into the water and maybe something moves down there, but it just could be a reflection of something in the sky.

##

Doc told you to talk about your past, your real one. He told you that everyone’s got a past, even you, and pretending you don’t have one is just hiding from yourself.

You told him about your past, or an assorted selection of pasts in any case. There’s the one with your abusive father, or the one with your unhappy wife, or the one with the childhood bullies, or the knife fight in the bar. Doc told you that wasn’t what he meant; he wants your _real_ past, but he doesn’t seem to understand that you’re giving him all you have. Pick a card, any card. They could all be true.

Like that telepathy thing. Maybe you really did believe that as a child. Or maybe you made it up. Still, it’s got some truth to it, at least. You always did believe that other people have something that you lack. Doc says it’s a conscience, and other people have said it’s a soul, but you’ve never been one to believe in the existence of either.

##

You get a room in a motel with gritty carpets and a thin mattress. You can hear someone talking in the next room, the voice a low constant drone. You would think it was the television but it never stops for a commercial break, just goes on and on.

You forget to sleep. Sometimes that happens. You sit by the door and count the stains in the carpet and think of the unmedicated blood running in your veins. The side effects from being off meds are always terrible. This time it seems to be vertigo, which makes the motel feel like it’s on a boat in a storm.

Or maybe you do sleep. At one point you think someone is talking to you, saying words that seem familiar but are complete unintelligible, like a language you used to know but you’ve forgotten.

When the sun rises, you climb into the bed and dream of nothing.


	2. Chapter 2

Everything has a bleached look to it when you walk the streets again. The sun raises worms of heat from the sidewalk but the wind keeps piping in and stealing it away before it can reach you. You keep your jacket on as you walk by the harbor, listening to the sounds of a city that is having trouble waking up. Or maybe it’s always like this, the fishing boats gone for the day, the university students tucked into their classrooms, the traffic lazy.

Somewhere a bell rings the hour, eleven. A bus gusts exhaust as it trundles down the road on its way to Innsmouth, along the edge of the water. You stare after it, remembering that urge last night that was trying to send you in that direction, and then you turn resolutely away.

You pass the back of a steepled church. The door is propped open with a paint can filled with cement. A square of sunlight falls into the doorway, illuminating some floorboards, and beyond that is pitch blackness. There is a sound inside, like skin scraping on grit, and you shudder at the noise but you don’t know why.

You have a few dollars left, so you buy yourself a sandwich at a takeout place and eat it standing in an alley, watching the traffic go by. There is a feeling between your shoulder blades like someone is watching you and you remember the flicker of something in the sky you saw last night. Is he here? Has he found you? Vengeance fails to rain down from above. You move on.

##

Madness has had its hold on you for as long as you can remember. It has had different names over the years, different diagnoses, but it’s always there like a constant friend. Antisocial personality disorder. Manic depressive disorder. Schizoaffective disorder. Schizophrenia. Narcissistic personality disorder. Psychopathy.

But it seems wrong to blame this sort of disordered thinking on something else. You don’t like to think that you’re the way you are because of chemicals in your brain or because of some traumatic past. You don’t think that society made you this way. Society is a set of restrains meant to keep people from giving into their desires. You’re beyond that. Above that.

People have told you that madness is like a cloud around your head, muddling your thoughts and dragging you down. But it’s not that at all. The way you are, this thing that other people call madness, is a way of seeing the world with more clarity than you could ever have otherwise. You wouldn’t give this up for anything. What would the world be like if there were more people like you?

##

You head back to your motel room early. There’s nothing to do in Arkham after the sun sets. Everyone seems to scurry into their houses and shut their doors. It’s nothing like Gotham, and for a second you almost regret leaving, but you couldn’t stay there. He would find you there.

There’s a man sitting on the curb outside of the motel, rocking back and forth. He smells like urine and seems to be talking to himself. You step around him and the man turns his head to watch you pass. He grabs your arm.

“The deep,” he says. “The dark House. They’re knocking.”

You pull your arm free and the man seems to lose interest, turning away. He’s just babbling, you know, but for some reason the words make something shiver in your chest.

You head into the motel and lock yourself in your room, but as soon as you’re inside, you feel as if you’re suffocating. The moon is pressing against the window, throwing its light through the curtains. You go to the window and look out towards it, watery and pale in the sky.

It’s possible that you forget what happens after that. You pace the room, and there are things swimming in your head like fish circling a bowl, and you want to leave the room but you can’t make yourself do it.

You come back to yourself when someone tries the handle of the door to your room. The door is locked and the deadbolt thrown. You hear a quiet key in the lock but the deadbolt holds. You cross the room quietly and press yourself against the door, listening. Someone is breathing out there.

You remember the flicker of black in the sky and the feeling of being watched. It’s not safe here. You’ll have to leave, go north, go…north…

You’re looking out the window again, and then maybe you’re sleeping. You dream of the water, and something cold that drags you down, and a cold, flexing strength that wraps around your body and pushes inside of you in every possible way. It fills you up so full that it tears you to pieces and then you float in the water like a cloud of stars, settling down into the deep.

##

By the time the sun is in the sky, your skin is itching. You can’t stop moving. You know he’s up there. Something inside you seems to recognize him. You don’t know why he’s just watching, though. It doesn’t seem like him.

When the bus to Innsmouth comes through, you step on, pay the driver and sit in the back. The bus rumbles along under an open, empty sky.

##

Doc tried to hypnotize you more than once, but it never seemed to work. You humored him, because it meant you didn’t have to think of something to say during your sessions together. You would just lie on the couch and listen to his voice droning on. Sometimes you would fall asleep and dream of things shifting in water far below you.

He told you that you could see things other people couldn’t. He said that in the old times, people valued higher states of consciousness like your own. He’s not the first psychologist you’ve ever met who should be on the other side of his couch, but you don’t mind his brand of crazy.

You ask him whether you ever said anything when you were hypnotized and he says you did, but he never tells you what you said.

##

The town of Innsmouth is like a mouth of rotted teeth. Decaying houses sit hunched against the sky, porches sagging, chimneys crumbling. The bus stops in a small town square and you get out.

Maybe coming here was a mistake. The town is so small that you stand out, but you’re not the only stranger in town. There are others around, wandering in a daze and looking towards the sea as if they've been drawn here.

When the day grows long, you follow a dirt road down to the beach and sit in the sand at the base of a dune fence. The wind off the water is chilly but you might be able to sleep here tonight. You pull your coat around yourself and watch the water. The vertigo comes back, making you feel like it’s the beach that’s bobbing, not the ocean.

There’s someone else on the beach. You didn’t notice him until he started to move but now you see that he’s standing just fifty feet away from you, shuffling through the sand. He has the glazed look of the overmedicated. You know it well. He’s murmuring to himself, his head bobbing convulsively every few minutes. Schizophrenic, like you. He steps to the edge of the water and stares down at his feet as the water laps over his toes.

The sun has set, leaving the sky to the west gold. Over the ocean, a deep violet blue sky is rising. You can see the first stars of the evening, the bright ones all in a line.

A dog starts howling somewhere down the street and the schizophrenic turns around. Another dog joins in. There are footsteps on the dirt path leading to the beach and you hunch down a little more against the dune fence. The schizophrenic takes a step back into the water, his eyes darting back and forth. The shadows welling in this pocket of the beach leave you unable to see who’s coming down the path, but more dogs are howling and you feel the hair raising on the back of your neck.

Black shapes come into view, slinking in and out of the shadows. The schizophrenic breaks and runs when they get close, splashing through the water. The figures follow, converging on the man and bringing him to the ground like a pack of wolves.

You get up off the sand and retreat down the beach, sticking to the shadows. As soon as you start to move, a head turns in your direction and you start to run. The sand sucks at your feet, making it hard to keep your balance. You can hear them behind you, sprinting across the ground. There are more dogs howling down the street. But wait, you never saw any dogs when you took the bus into town.

The figures gain on you and one of them grabs for your arm. You dart sideways, to the water, which slows you down even more until you fling yourself into an oncoming wave and slip under the surface.

The water is cold and black as nothing else. You don’t come up for air until your lungs are screaming at you. When you finally come up, breaking the surface with a gasp, the beach is far to your right and the figures are standing there, watching you. There are more figures on the beach now, some of them struggling and screaming as they are driven into the water. A figure in black, like a ragged bit of the night sky, detaches from the roof of the hotel and plummets down to the beach.

Something wraps around your ankle and tugs.

##

The last time you saw the doc was at your last therapy session.

“Maybe you do lack something that we have,” he says, looking you over. “A past. A conscience. A soul. But it makes you stronger.”

You say nothing, waiting impatiently. He smiles at your expression.

“Make it look good,” he says, unlocking your handcuffs. You have a map and some cash in your pocket, courtesy of the doc. He looks proud, his eyes gleaming, the Necronomicon sitting open on his desk. He closes his eyes to wait for your punch.

You break his neck to make it really believable.

##

You go down, the water closing over your head. You kick but whatever is around your ankle is holding you tightly. You can’t get free. You reach down to your ankle and feel something rubbery and tough as leather. You dig your fingernails into it and try to tear at it but it refuses to give.

Something else grabs your wrist and now you feel the ridges of suction cups. A third tentacle wraps around your thigh and you are yanked down, down, down. There is nothing but black around you, a dark more complete than anything you’ve ever seen. There is no surface, no sea floor, nothing but the darkness and you and the tentacles dragging you down.

In the blackness you suddenly remember Doc’s voice reading to you as you lay on the couch in his office and the words echo in your head, reverberating in the water around you. _Ph'nglui mglw'nafh Cthulhu R'lyeh wgah'nagl fhtagn_. The words have a sudden terrible significance.

“The mad have a special connection to the Elder Gods,” Doc told you. “Your unordered minds can comprehend their existence more fully than we ever could. When Cthulhu rises from his house in the deep, madness will reign.”

You manage to get your free hand into the pocket of your coat and find your knife. Your air is running out. You hack at the tentacle on your leg and it tightens, sliding up your thigh. You remember your dream and you stab at it wildly, the last of your air trickling out of your nose. Something else grabs your shoulder from above and you know that it’s over.

Except the thing at your shoulders pulls you towards the surface, fighting against the pull of the tentacles. Something dark and solid slides into the water next to you. A gloved hand grabs your head and then a firm mouth presses against yours, pushing air into your lungs. You suck it in and clutch at him, trying not to gulp for more air when there isn’t any. He saws at the tentacles wrapped around you and under your combined efforts they give.

You both kick towards the surface, and you’re glad that he seems to know which way is up. It seems as if the surface is miles overhead and you keep kicking, keep straining.

As you kick, suddenly there is a sound in the water. It is more than a sound; it is what you imagine a mountain might sound like if it spoke. It shakes your whole body, shakes the ocean around you, reverberating up from some impossible distance under the water. You can imagine that it shakes the earth itself.

You burst back up to the surface, gasping and choking on the air. Overhead, the stars are glittering in alignment. The figures in the beach are scattered and unconscious, defeated, but the people that were driven into the water are gone, dragged down to the deep as sacrifices.

The two of you tread water and as the ocean speaks again you cling to each other because there is no other response. He says nothing to you and you say nothing back and you wait for the deep to rise.


End file.
